U.S. to hand over inmates to nascent Afghan courts

Amy Waldman, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 26, 2004

2004-08-26 04:00:00 PDT Kabul, Afghanistan -- Afghans now being held in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan will be tried and sentenced by the Afghan government, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.

The decision was reached Aug. 4 between Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of the U.S.-led alliance in Afghanistan, and President Hamid Karzai, Maj. Scott Nelson, an alliance spokesman, said at a news briefing. "The people that are still being held here will be tried in Afghan courts and under the Afghan justice system," he said.

The decision represents an acknowledgement that the detainees do not represent an international security threat. Those who do, Nelson said, have been moved to the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and will face trial there.

Alliance officials have not provided an exact figure on the number of Afghans in U.S. detention, but it is believed to stretch into the hundreds.

But because Afghanistan barely has a functioning judicial and prison system, the detainees will remain in U.S. custody indefinitely. "We are just not there yet, and that is why unfortunately we have additional people in our detainee facilities," Nelson said.

"They are there because we need to have a justice system within Afghanistan and a prison system within Afghanistan that allow us to have an Afghan solution to justice for these people," he said.

On Saturday, Cherif Bassiouni, a U.N. independent expert on human rights in Afghanistan, sharply criticized the continued detention of about 725 prisoners captured during the war against the Taliban in 2001. The prisoners, who had been transferred from a prison at Shibergan in northern Afghanistan to Pul-e-Charkhi prison near Kabul, are being kept in inhuman conditions, Bassiouni said, and there appears to be no legal basis for holding them.

About 350 of those prisoners are Pakistani. On Tuesday, Pakistan's foreign office said Karzai and the Pakistani prime minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, had reached an agreement under which about 400 Pakistanis would be released in exchange for about 250 Afghans held in Pakistani jails on minor crimes.

Nelson also said parts of a report by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby on conditions and practices in the network of prisons run by U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be released "very, very soon." Barno ordered the report in May, and it was completed in June, but the release of any of it has been repeatedly delayed. At least four detainees have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan.